Free The Border Part Three by Amy Cross Page A

where I was on the nights those two girls were strangled?” Ben asked, his voice thick with tension.
    “Yeah,” Alex replied with a smile, “exactly like that.”
    “And do I have to tell you?”
    “Do you have to?” Alex paused. “Well -”
    “Just talk to the man,” Harry said firmly, patting him on the shoulder. “Ben, that’s the only reason I brought you here. To talk to him.”
    “It is, huh?”
    Harry nodded. “And to clear things up, to make sure that there’s nothing here to worry about.”
    “So how about it?” Alex continued. “It’ll be just you and me, Ben. Your father won’t come in, he’ll wait out here, to keep things professional. It’ll be you and me, going over some things, and it’ll take forty minutes, maybe an hour at most.”
    “Forty minutes?” Ben asked. “That seems like a little more than a chat.”
    “It’s a thorough chat,” Alex told him. “Real thorough.”
    Ben paused for a moment, staring at his father, before turning and starting to make his way into the interview room. His hands were shaking, poised to clench into fists, and his eyes had filled with a sense of pure, unadulterated fury as he heard Alex shutting the door and sealing them both in the room. On the far side of the room, there was a table with two chairs, and on the table there was a tape recorder.
    ***
    “Well, don’t you feel better now?” Harry asked as he followed Ben out of the police station a couple of hours later. “Doesn’t it feel good to get things off your chest and face things, man to man?”
    Stopping just ahead, Ben stared across the town square. His eyes, still filled with shock and anger, watched as people went about their daily business. How many others, he wondered, thought the same as his father? How many thought there was a chance, small but worth investigating, that he, Ben Freeman, was the one who’d strangled and mutilated those two girls? He’d always enjoyed his status as an outsider, as someone who didn’t conform, but now he was starting to see the dark side of not fitting in. After a moment, a woman stepped out of the bank and glanced in his direction; their eyes met for a moment, she didn’t smile, and then she continued on her way. Seconds after that, a kid rode past on a bike, and although he didn’t look at Ben, he seemed to be studiously avoiding eye contact, almost as if he’d been warned by his mother not to look at the weird blonde-haired kid who might have a dark secret.
    “Ben Freeman’s weird,” he imagined the kid’s mother saying. “Keep away from him. There’s just something a little off about him.”
    “Son?” Harry said after a moment. “You coming to the hardware store with me?”
    Slowly, Ben turned to face his father.
    “Now come on,” Harry continued with a smile and a sigh. “Let’s not have any silliness. It was good to come down here and straighten things out.” Reaching out, he tried to put a hand on Ben’s shoulder, but the boy instinctively pulled away. “Ben, you’ve got to understand -”
    “I understand,” Ben replied, his voice trembling with shock.
    “I didn’t bring you down here to embarrass or humiliate you. Alex just -”
    “You called Alex. He told me. You called him and told him I’d dyed my hair, and that I matched the description of the killer.”
    “Hang on, that’s not what happened -”
    “He told me,” Ben said firmly. There were tears in his eyes, but that’s where they stayed: in his eyes, not rolling down his cheeks. He refused to let them do that, even though he was filling with a slow, quaking rage at the thought that a member of his own family had begun to suspect him.
    “Are you going to be a child about this?” Harry asked, still forcing a smile. “Come on, it’s over now, let’s go to the hardware store and the electrical place and then we can get home and you can play those video games or whatever the hell else it is that you like wasting your time on.” Still smiling, he